The Notice After the Last Beans

What Vern did

At six the next morning, Nate’s pickup was parked in Paul’s yard beside the shop.

Paul and Nate were in there drinking coffee out of the shop pot and going over Paul’s spring plans on the back of a seed invoice. I was in the house putting dishes away.

At about a quarter to seven, I looked out the kitchen window and saw Vern coming across the road on foot.

He didn’t drive. He walked, the whole quarter mile, down his lane and across the blacktop and up Paul’s lane, in his feed cap and his tan coat, with his hands in his pockets.

I set down the plate I was holding and went out on the porch. I couldn’t help it.

Nate came out of the shop when he saw him. Paul came out behind him. Nate stood very straight. I had never seen him stand that straight in front of his father.

Vern walked right past Nate. He didn’t look at him. He walked up to Paul and stopped about three feet away.

Paul set his coffee cup down on the tailgate of Nate’s pickup.

Vern took his feed cap off and held it in both hands.

“Paul,” he said. “What are you paying my boy?”

It was so quiet in that yard I could hear a train on the far side of Princeton.

Paul did not look at Nate. He did not look at me. He looked right at Vern, the way one man of that age looks at another one he has known for sixty years.

“Fifty two thousand, Vern. And the house, utilities paid. Twenty two an hour for Holly, the cart and the books.”

Vern stood there with his cap in his hands.

I watched him do the arithmetic. I knew he was doing it because I had watched him do arithmetic in his head for ten years, standing over the cart at the elevator, adding up bushels.

He was adding up ten years.

“That’s fair,” he said finally. His voice was rough. “That’s a fair wage.”

“I think so,” Paul said.

Vern nodded. Then he turned, at last, and looked at Nate.

“Your grandpa would have run me off the place for asking that question,” he said. “I never once asked it. Not of him. Not of myself.”

Nate didn’t say anything. I don’t think he could.

Vern put his cap back on. He nodded once to Paul, and once to Nate, and then he looked up at me on the porch and nodded to me too.

Then he walked home. The whole quarter mile, the same way he came.

That was what he did. It was not an apology. It was not a check. He asked a man what his son was worth, and he heard the answer out loud, and he did not argue with it.

For Vern, I have come to understand, that was a very big thing.

Winter

November on Paul’s place was the first easy month I’d had in ten years. Not easy because the work was light. Easy because the work was paid.

We ran anhydrous on Paul’s corn ground for next year. Nate rebuilt the head on Paul’s old planter in a heated shop. I moved Paul’s books off a spiral notebook and onto the computer and found him eleven hundred dollars he’d overpaid on crop insurance.

Across the road, it was harder.

Vern called around for a hired man. I know because people told me. The co op manager in Princeton told me. Paul’s cousin told me. Vern called every name anybody gave him.

There was nobody. There is never anybody in this county anymore. The young men who want to farm are farming for their own families, and the ones who don’t want to are in Peoria and Bloomington and the Quad Cities.

Vern hauled his own grain to the elevator in December. With his bad shoulder. I saw his semi go by on the blacktop, slow, and I saw him climb down at the scale one afternoon holding his arm against his side.

I saw the shop light on across the road at ten at night more than once. One man, sixty four, in a shop built for three.

I didn’t feel good about it. I want to say that plainly. I did not sit in Paul’s warm kitchen and feel like I had won something.

He was Nate’s dad. He had taught Nate to drive a tractor at nine. He had sat up all night with Nate in the hospital in Peoria when Nate was eleven and broke his leg falling off a hay wagon.

He was not a bad man. He was a man who had been handed one way of doing things and had never once been told there was another one.

Spring was coming for him either way. Twelve hundred acres and no one to run the planter.